This past year marked the one- year anniversary of the Pacolet Library offering free General Equivalent Diploma (GED) assessment and preparation. A person with a GED has the potential to earn up to an additional $200,000 through their lifetime of work. To date, we have had 110 registrations, 26 enrollees, and six graduates. This is a potential economic impact of $1.2 million for the graduates and $52 million if all the enrollees successfully complete the program.

The Chesnee Library averages 8 to 10 homeschoolers for programs per month. The average cost of a ticket for a local education program is $5. Using the numbers above, homeschoolers are saving about $100 per month by attending the homeschool programs at the Chesnee Library. This total comes from an average of 10 homeschoolers per month times two since most of the time a parent would also attend times the average of $5 for a ticket.

At Cyrill-Westside they host one homeschool program per week for a total of four per month. There are roughly 15 to 20 attendees at each program for a total of approximately 80 per month. Using the numbers above, homeschoolers are saving about $800 per month by attending our homeschool programs at the Cyrill-Westside Library.

At Middle Tyger Library they host two homeschool programs per month with an average of 10 in attendance. Using the numbers above, homeschoolers are saving about $100 per month by attending our homeschool programs at the Middle Tyger Library.

Homeschool programs are offered at all of our branch locations.

In 2018 we worked with the United Way of the Piedmont, Wofford College and Impact America to offer free volunteer income tax preparation service. These services were offered around the County at all of our branch locations. This program served 1,406 individuals from January to April with an economic return of $2,000,000.

Last year the Spartanburg County Public Libraries hosted a total of 32 legal clinics and eight divorce clinics. Assuming each session lasted an hour and the average attorney fee is $250 per hour (How, and How Much, Do Lawyers Charge?). Patrons who attended our clinics could save around $10,000 on legal advice.

Exercise classes are offered 6 days per week at 7 of our 10 branch locations. A total of 12 classes are offered per week or 48 classes per month. Assuming the average cost for a personal trainer is $60 - $70 per one hour session (How Much Does a Personal Trainer Cost?) and the average cost of a single drop-in yoga session is $12 per class (How Much Do Yoga Classes Cost?), if you attended one of our fitness classes per week; four classes per month you would save $48 per month for a single class or $240 - $280 per month for personal training sessions.

During the course of 2018, patrons checked out approximately 1,918,644 items from all of our branch locations, the Bookmobile and through our Homebound program. The total value of these items is roughly $38,759,552. Taking into account the total number of items checked out at each branch as well as the number of patrons on average at each location it is estimated that individual patrons save on average anywhere from $810.14 to $2,470.60 per year by checking out library materials as opposed to purchasing them.

Geocaching is an international treasure hunt game using handheld GPS receivers. In Spartanburg County, geocachers may earn a special SCPL geocaching coin for completing a specially designed geocaching trail. As of the end of January 2019, we have awarded 208 coins since the trail began on September 12, 2015. Geocachers are asked to write down approximately how much they spend to acquire a coin so based on these self-reported numbers there has been an estimated economic impact to our area of $17,680 since the trail’s inception. Geocachers have visited our area from 16 states including - Arizona, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia.

Numerous studies indicate that students who don’t read or read infrequently during their summer vacation see their reading abilities stagnate or decline. Starting in kindergarten, if a student reads 20 minutes a day at home, they will hear 1.8 million words per year. They will have read for 851 hours by 6th grade and on standardized tests, they will likely score better than 90% of their peers.

Some researchers estimate students learn one new word of vocabulary for every thousand words read.⁶ Using this ratio, a student who reads only 1.5 million words would learn only 1,500 new vocabulary words from reading, while a student who reads 13.7 million words would learn 13,700 new vocabulary terms—more than nine times the amount of vocabulary growth.

⁶ Mason, J.M., Stahl, S. A. , Au, K. H. , & Herman, P. A. (2003). Reading: Children’s developing knowledge of words. In J. Flood, D. Lapp, J. R. Squire, & J. M. Jensen (Eds.), Handbook of research on teaching the English language arts (2nd ed., pp. 914-930). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.